Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/WASHINGTON: A popular USA novelist Paul Auster is turning his sights on America’s epidemic of gun violence in a hard-hitting, hundred-page essay that features photos from mass shootings.
“Bloodbath Nation” is due to be published on Tuesday in the United States of America.
The writing in that new work by Auster, 75, is terse and somber and has accompanied by pictures taken by the photographer Spencer Ostrander.
US gun violence
According to the AFP, Paul said one of the reasons he has written it has the family secret that was kept from him until he was young man. “The truth comes down to this: on January 23, 1919,” he writes in the book, “my grandmother shot and killed my grandfather.”
Paul said his father was only six years old then and his uncle, who witnessed the killing, was nine.
A grandmother went on trial in Wisconsin but was found innocent for reasons of temporary insanity. She and her 5 children ended up settling in New Jersey, “where my father grew up in the wrecked family.”
Auster wrote that “The Gun had caused all this, and not only did children have no father, but they also lived with the knowledge that their mother had killed him,”.
Like gun control advocates or victims’ associations before him, Auster recites a horrifying number associated with gun violence in America: more than 40,000 citizens die by a gunfire each year, half of them suicides. And guns outnumber citizens, by 393 million to 338 million.
A book features dozens of black and white photos by Ostrander of the scenes of the mass shootings, such as the LGBTQ nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida in 2016. More than 50 people died in that massacre.
They also show a supermarket, a temple, a parking lot, or other places but never a human being.
Ostrander said during an interview “I chose to focus on the site of the shooting as a symbol. Whether it’s rebuilt, whether it’s razed, whether it’s left to decay, that’s a symbol of how Americans value this issue,”.
“The fissures in American society are steadily growing into great chasms of empty space, “Auster writes in his book.
